View Single Post
Old 02-12-2003, 10:41 PM   #55
Kujo
Join Date: Dec 2002
Posts: 9
Offline
Hello again all,

Just starting off with a joke:

ever notice that anything with "science" in its name isn't one? (creation science, christian science, political science...)

anyway, been interesting reading, this thread.

some of you may enjoy this article:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2078486/

Here, a science writer describes why he turned away from Buddhism, and why he abandoned routes of spirituality because he could not reconcile them with what he perceived science concluded about reality.

A quote of the final paragraph:

"All religions, including Buddhism, stem from our narcissistic wish to believe that the universe was created for our benefit, as a stage for our spiritual quests. In contrast, science tells us that we are incidental, accidental. Far from being the raison d'´ętre of the universe, we appeared through sheer happenstance, and we could vanish in the same way. This is not a comforting viewpoint, but science, unlike religion, seeks truth regardless of how it makes us feel. Buddhism raises radical questions about our inner and outer reality, but it is finally not radical enough to accommodate science's disturbing perspective. The remaining question is whether any form of spirituality can."

It is quite a provocative statement! I do not agree that science tell us that we are accidental. Science is a tool for understanding, integrating and extrapolating our observations of this shared reality in an objective fashion. The conclusions one derives are always placed within a very well-defined context. Such a generalized statement that "we are accidental" steps outside of science and becomes a personal opinion.

The author of the article has an interesting website too: www.johnhorgan.com. I'm curious to see what people think of what this author has to say.

I still don't know enough about ki to say anything new about it, but I will say this about science:

Anybody could make science sound like Trivial Pursuit, a bizarre urge to collect facts that other people don't consider interesting, or some sort of categorization fetish. It is not these things! It is a way of using wonder and intellect to construct progressively refined models of reality. Its power lies in reproducible experiments and models that can incorporate past data and test future predictions. Therefore, one obvious way science won't increase your understanding is that if you can't devise an experiment where you can put in controls or explain certain results, it can't help you. This happens a lot in research -- the unexpected result, the unexplained phenomenon. Science doesn't seek to idolize these events. Science backs up one step, and refines the experiment so that it can be interpreted. This approach is necessarily limited. That is both its weakness and its strength. Science makes no comment about what to do when you're stuck and can't think of cool experiments. But then, it doesn't *impose* a methodology either. The blank slate is prison and freedom both.

To repeat: Science is not a religion! The roots of many religions was an explicit way to organize societies -- morality was a way to keep people from killing each other or dying prematurely. It is no accident that religions are so preoccupied with controlling sex and food -- sex usually led to more humans to deal with, and food was needed to keep humans existing. Science does not codify any sort of ethics regarding these activities. The only ethics codified within science are designed to protect the quality of science (not talking about the wider ethics of examining how science affects society -- that's a different topic).

Anyway, I'm still neutral on the idea of whether or not what science has shown so far will grant useful insight into defining/demonstrating ki as a universal constant. However, I do believe that application of the scientific method to study how ki, or the concept of ki, affects people -- that to me is a much more tractable phenomenon.

And I stand by my earlier posts that cherry-picking scientific facts to match or provide evidence for one's preconceived ideology about *anything* is intellectually dishonest. It may be an emotional exercise to figure out why you feel the way you do, but don't call it science. Call it therapy.

kujo
  Reply With Quote